There and Back Again

I finally got through my incoming bookmark category and read up on all the AJAX stuff that looked useful. I also updated my resource browser code to allow you to browse by any tag.

I also had a couple other non AJAX related sites that look interesting.
First is Yahoo’s Term Extraction webservice, im not sure if its a good thing or not since the beauty of tags is that they are human created metadata, but I can see it being quite useful to add tags like to a large set of documents to make them more usable. I also ran into TinyMCE, one of those javascript rich text editors, the plugins support looks great for easy customization, which is something I always find I need when im trying to shoehorn one of these things in a current app.

Finally here are the new items in the resource library, If you click on a category you can read the extended description, and see the extra information i’ve got tags to the items.

library

CPAINT: Cross-Platform Asynchronous INterface Toolkit

PHP & ASP AJAX toolkit gpl and lgpl license

AjaxAC - Open-source PHP framework for creating AJAX / JavaScript applications

AJAX library for php with a focus on doing all the coding php side

tutorial

particletree · Degradable Ajax Form Validation

Tutorial showing howto use AJAX to validate a form, backend code in asp and php

phpRiot() :: Cloning Google Suggest with AjaxAC :: PHP articles, PHP tutorials, MySQL tutorials, PostgreSQL tutorials

Huge tutorial explaining ever step in building an application (google suggest clone) with AjaxAC

PHPBuilder.com: XMLHttpRequest and AJAX for PHP programmers, Part 2

Extension of an earlier tutorial showing basic text replacement

ONLamp.com: Ajax on Rails

Tutorial covering how to use Rails built in AJAX features

article

Silicon Valley Watcher: Where can you find Flickr and Apple in the same room? At the AJAX Summit of course. An insider report from the press-free zone where the future of webdev is being mapped out.

Article giving an overview of AJAX and a quick review of the O’Reilly/Adaptive Path AJAX Summit

Making Magic Happen: Predicting User Behavior in AJAX applications

Essay covering using AJAX to prefetch data for a user to improve there overall experience

blog

Joel Webber’s Blog -as simple as possible, but no simpler

Author of Drip, IE Leak detector as well as general AJAX commentary

So I had a linksys wireless router that I use to share internet between my laptop and megans ibook, its an older 802.11b job a befw11s4 or something like that. So Megan got a new ibook today, yeah I know the new intel mac’s ones are coming out but thats not for a year and the current 800mhz thing is slow and was the old OS and had a 12 inch screen with a poor viewing angle. So we got a new one, nothing insanely fancy but its a 1.3ghz with 786meg of ram, and to make a long story short it broke the router.

So you connect to the router and about a minute latter internet stops working, reboot the router and sometimes the cable modem too and things work again. Very odd stuff, so I just went out and got a new one, one of those wrt54g models that run linux. Once I ignored there setup program that didn’t work right and just used the web interface everything was good. I now have working wireless, and its even g on the ibook, of course I somehow managed to get a new laptop with only built in b.

So now that I have a working internal bookmark system that passes it data through to del.icio.us i’ve finished the next step and converted the resource pages on my blog to using my custom rendering pages. Its much simpler then parsing rss feeds since I actually have the database so I just wrapped my 3 table solution in a couple objects.

Unfortunatly this moved the urls since the new pages need to match up to tag names. At some point i’ll have a solution for this, but the mod_rewrite rule is already getting a bit scary.

The front page stayed the same but the subcategory pages changed:

• Articles
• Blogs
• Libraries
• OSS Projects
• Tutorials

You’ll notice less high level subcategories on the library front, some will come back as I get my tag set figured out and coherent, but since each entry shows the tags you have more information anyway.

Changes to the list can be found on my del.icio.us feed, but thats not quite as useful since my long descriptions aren’t stored there. You’ll also notice how im abusing tagging a bit, there are tons of tags named category:value, I call these attributes and will hopefully allow me to easily create lots of different view of this data.

If anyone wants to take a look at the code let me know, I’m not sure if I want to go open source with it since its really hackish right now, but if someone wants to help make it more generic (less of my urls hardcoded in it) send me an email.

Oh and if anyone is wondering how im manging the wordpress integration the trick is page templates.

And finally my todo list on this project:

• Add editing support
• Create my own feeds so all the info is available
• Provide generic tag browsing by making them links everywhere and adding a generic mod_rewrite rule for them
• fixing my mod_rewrite rule to make the old urls work?

I’ve been working on a long term solution for my AJAX resource lists, i wasted a couple hours trying out del.icio.us and Spurl. del.icio.us is great except it doesn’t allow for a large comment which is the whole point of my resource list. Spurl has a large comment section but the interface for tagging isn’t as nice as del.icio.us and its feeds don’t give you all the tags for each item which is a deal breaker for me.

So I went on a bit of a hacking using del.icio.us as my base. I added a half screen scraped post screen extending the form and having it post to my server so I could store the data in my database. I then use the api to add the entry to del.icio.us.

This way I get the neat javascript tricks for editing without anywork, and my base list is in del.icio.us so the minimal info is readily available. Plus it gives me feeds with no work.

I already have basic posting working and I hacked up a quick view page, which should be ready to replace the articles page on my blog with just a little more work.

The only other large piece to do support editing, I think i’ll follow the same half screen scraped model. At some point I might stop the screen scraping and just use a greasemonkey script to add in my extra text area and change the form action, but I won’t worry about that until someting in my current hack breaks.

I think this approach turned out working really well, I’m actually the master source for my content, and since its in my db creating special views is cake, plus I get all the normal del.icio.us benefits.

(Oh and HTTP_Request is a great class)

Thanks to everyone who posted links on my last post, besides a couple articles it wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before but it was push to get those things added which is great.

New Updates:

Articles

• XML.com: Very Dynamic Web Interfaces
• ONLamp.com: A Simpler Ajax Path

Blogs

• Ajax Blog

DHTML Libraries

• dojo: the browser toolkit (note this has a AJAX lib in it as well)

JS AJAX Libraries

• Prototype: Object-Orient Javascript Library (note this has a dhtml effect library too)

Toolkits

• Toxic

Reviewing this new round of content I noticed a couple things, there are lots of same old intro to XMLHttpRequest posts, and most libraries and toolkits have poor documentation even if they have lots of it.

The most important thing for any project open source or not is to getting started guide that gets a user acomplishing your projects main purpose with as little effort as possible (Yeah I know phpDocumentor is missing this too).

On to different point, the basic CMS in wordpress sucks for managing this, anyone have any suggestions my needs are.
Easy to create and use simple templates for each item
The ability to tag items so they can be in multiple categories
The ability to view items in category lists like they are now

If anyone has any suggestions on some opensource project that I can integrate easily with wordpress (shouldn’t be hard its cms is mod_rewrite based) let me know. I wouldn’t even mind hacking up some code but I really don’t need a new large project, cause plain old brute force text editing always works even if its painful.

Also on a totally unrelated note, wordpress timezone management sucks. Times should still be UTC on the darn rss feed even if they are MST when view on the blog, or at least they should be reported as MST and not UTC with 7 hours subtracted, now to hack in a solution.

I’ve started compiling lists of the various AJAX resources i’ve found. This is mainly to help me out in some of the writing i’ve been doing but I thought it would help all of you out as well.

Some people do this sort of thing with tons of blog posts, but I’m not really happy with the sort of organization system you get for that sort of thing. I’m using the wordpress pages functionality to manage my lists, its just basic cms functionality if i see that this doesn’t work, i’ll have to parse the html and put all the content in a db, but for now this is easier.

The content is pretty basic right now since I try to write a small overview for everything on the list and It takes me time to refind things I read but forgot to bookmark.

If you know of anything that fits into one of the categories let me know on a comment to this post thanks.